FEATURED ARTICLES ABOUT UNION ARMY - PAGE 2

A Sleeper of a story: Palatine Historical Society board members Connie Rawa and Denise Limburg are working to put their town on the map when it comes to the Civil War. "With the Civil War and Illinois, people always think about Galena and Springfield," said Rawa, a 6th-grade teacher at Palatine's Lake Louise School. "So we set out to learn about Palatine's connection to the Civil War, and the deeper we dig, the more we find out. So far we've documented more than 100 men from the Palatine area who served in the Union Army, most of them in 113th Illinois Infantry."

Mingling with the likes of Gen. Ulysses S. Grant, Sojourner Truth and President Abraham Lincoln helps teach Civil War buffs and the uninitiated alike a sense of history and community, said participants in the largest Civil War reenactment in Northern Illinois. Civil War Days last weekend featured 600 re-enactors from seven states, with volunteers stepping into the roles of infantry, cavalry and artillery soldiers, as well as musicians and civilians from the mid-19th century. There also was a narrated battle re-enactment followed by a re-enactment of an address by President Lincoln and five Civil War generals.

By Dick Adler. Dick Adler writes about mysteries for the Tribune, Publishers Weekly and various Internet sites. His first mystery, "The Mozart Code," has been published as an electronic book by Hard Shell Word Factory, www.hardshell.com, and is also available as a Rocket E-book from bn.com | November 28, 1999

FADED COAT OF BLUE By Owen Parry Avon, 338 pages, $23 ANGEL TRUMPET By Ann McMillan Viking, 205 pages, $22.95 As we plummet toward the millennium, the Civil War still eats at our public and private hearts--a national obsession that has produced such fine novels as "The Killer Angels" and "The Black Flower." Mysteries set in that era have also been impressive: Miriam Grace Monfredo's bracing books about an upstate New York librarian ("Must the Maiden Die" was reviewed here recently)

PITTSBURGH (Reuters) - Fifty years after the Battle of Gettysburg, the bloodiest of the U.S. Civil War, a survivor of that fight marched 200 miles from Pittsburgh to the site of the battle for a reunion attended by both Union and Confederate veterans. On Sunday, another veteran, Jim Smith, 70, of Hempfield, Pennsylvania, will start out on the same trek as part of the observation of Memorial Day, when Americans honor their war dead. By a stroke of luck, Smith will be carrying the same drum - a throaty field snare - played by his spiritual forebear, Union Army veteran Peter Guibert.

The gunshots pierced the calm of a sunny afternoon as Maryann Holland of Des Plaines and her son Paul, 12, watched from the grassy sidelines. They were witnessing a Civil War re-enactment, featured last weekend at the United Methodist Campground's 38th annual Country Fair and Festival. "I just wanted to see the stuff that they did and just wanted to see the guns that they had," said Paul, as the 10th Regiment Illinois Volunteer Infantrymen aimed their weapons above the treetops.

Memorial Day weekend usually means parades, picnics and the start of summer, but originally it was a remembrance of wartime sacrifices. Apart from the Chicago parade (see box), there are several ways to honor the holiday. Illinois native John A. Logan, a Civil War corps commander in the Union Army and later a U.S. senator, was a founding member in 1866 of the Grand Army of the Republic, a Civil War veterans organization. As commander-in-chief of the G.A.R. in 1868, he issued an order declaring May 30--the date on which Memorial Day was observed until changed in 1971 to the last Monday in May--as a day to place flowers on the graves of Civil War soldiers.

Before Memorial Day became a long weekend unofficially launching summer, the holiday honoring American war dead was celebrated every year on May 30. It got its start as Decoration Day, established in 1868 as an occasion to place flowers on the graves of those who died in the Civil War. That was 135 years ago, but a remarkable 8th-grade class project in Peoria has uncovered some living links to the War Between the States -- men whose fathers fought...